Opinion: Biden squandered this opportunity during State of the Union

Editor’s Note: Lawrence Downes, a writer and editor, covered immigration and politics for The New York Times Editorial Board from 2004 to 2017. He is the co-author, with Linda Ronstadt, of “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

President Joe Biden talked a lot about jobs and workers during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. That was expected — the address is a report card, and presidents love to brag about their grades, in this case booming job numbers and the lowest unemployment rate since 1969.

For a president whose bywords are “infrastructure” and “made in America,” the speech was a perfect moment to summon the nation to a great industrial renewal.

“Finish the job,” he said, a dozen times. “Support the workers who are doing God’s work.”

But who are these workers he was talking about? They include millions of people he barely mentioned — undocumented workers living in legal limbo, stranded by the failure of immigration reform. Biden gave that issue its traditional glancing mention deep in the laundry-list section of the speech — a little bit after he spoke about “junk” hotel surcharges and identity fraud, when he urged Congress to fix our “border problems.”

What a blown opportunity, especially in a time of rampant xenophobia, anti-immigrant violence and the zero-sum, border-obsessed politics that are former President Donald Trump’s toxic gift to the national discourse.

These strong economic tailwinds have given Biden a chance to reshape the conversation about work in the United States; to make it more honest, and to show how making the American workplace better for everyone means making it better and safer for immigrants, including the 11 million undocumented.

Biden is the nearest thing we’ve had to a blue-collar president in more than a generation, and he’s made labor a cornerstone of his administration. It’s good that he wants to revive industries, fix infrastructure, improve public works and build clean energy sources, semiconductors and electric cars.

But on Tuesday he needed to go further — to connect the industrial dots, to defy the mindset about immigrants that separates “them” from “us,” to make it clear that supporting American workers and doing right by America’s immigrants are essentially the same thing.

Because most Americans in reflector vests and steel-toe boots or working drive-through booths or checkout lines have more in common with immigrant day laborers or nannies than with the right-wing politicians and media figures who stoke America with rage about the foreign-born.

“Immigration” is a tune-out word in politics, evoking insoluble policy debates that stir only anger or apathy. But it doesn’t have to be. Immigration is one of this country’s finest attributes, the source of its proudest stories. And those stories are rooted in immigrant labor.

I wanted to hear Biden on Tuesday night speaking loudly and proudly about his administration’s recent decision to let undocumented immigrants blow the whistle on dangerous and exploitative employers. The Homeland Security secretary quietly implemented a new policy last month that defers deportation and grants work authorization to undocumented immigrants who step forward in labor investigations.

It’s a smart, bold move that protects the rights of all workers, including native-born Americans. If Biden wants to be the labor president, he should be hitting this point hard and often. We can’t have labor protections only for some workers, while others — immigrants without papers — are abused and exploited and treated like they don’t exist. We can’t keep deferring justice until some illusory goal is met — until a 2,000-mile wall is built or Congress passes an immigration bill or some other future thing happens.

And we can’t keep delegating immigration policy to governors in states like Texas and Florida, whose cruel, useless stunts include busing immigrants across the country in the dead of winter and dumping shipping containers on the border and calling it a wall.

Congress hasn’t come close to a major overhaul of immigration laws since Ted Kennedy and John McCain were in the Senate. Many of their successors have shown no interest in governing in good faith. Biden should not be passing the legislative buck to them.

What if instead of making the ritual State of the Union call for Congress to fix things, Biden had announced that he was going to meet with day laborers to help sign them up as workplace whistleblowers?

What if he promised to go to a memorial service for immigrant essential workers who labored on the front lines of the pandemic, who got sick and died so that the rest of us could stay safe at home? What if he proposed immigration relief for their surviving relatives — citizenship to honor their ultimate sacrifice?

What if he threw his wholehearted support behind immigrant organizing and collective bargaining and strengthening worker centers across the country?

Most Republicans would be outraged. But of course they would. They care not at all about the injustice of millions working on the edge of survival. They use immigrants as bait for their base, pointing at the wrong people to blame for any and all problems.

It’s an old story, and many native-born keep falling for it. On Long Island, where I live, people spent years arguing over immigrant day laborers — and missing the point completely. The workers filled a labor gap — contractors and homeowners wanted them for jobs they wouldn’t or couldn’t do themselves. Politicians and talk-show hosts milked the hostility until it curdled into hatred. Workers were harassed and viciously attacked, and sometimes hunted and killed.

This was true around the country. Then one day a real estate developer turned entertainer from Queens declared that some Mexican immigrants were rapists and implied that he was running for president to deal with them. He later called America “a dumping ground for the rest of the world.” In 2015, some opinion journalists seemed amused or intrigued to see an entertaining new celebrity shaking up our infotainment politics.

The entertainer won the presidency and four years of hatred followed. Children were torn from their parents by federal agents. Migrants desperate for asylum were unjustly turned away at the border. Unprecedented limits on asylum also made conditions more dangerous. For decades, migrants have died crossing the burning Sonoran Desert; under the Trump administration, others battled freezing temperatures in refugee camps beside the Rio Grande as asylum seekers were forced to wait outside the US while their cases were pending. In 2019, a gunman slaughtered dozens of Latinos at a WalMart in El Paso, Texas, after posting an online manifesto that repeated Republican talking points about a “Hispanic invasion,” according to police.

Biden may tread lightly on immigration because conventional political thinking says that it’s a third rail; that he’ll regret giving Fox News more things to rouse the rabble with.

But hope is a hard thing to suppress, and immigrants’ determination can prod leaders into action. Former President Barack Obama ran a prodigious deportation campaign, but he also created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to protect young immigrant “Dreamers” — a bold executive move that did more for immigrants than Congress has in decades. Those young immigrants pushed Obama to do the right thing. Immigrant workers can similarly inspire Biden.

It’s Biden’s turn to finish the job. Starting now, he can focus on the ways his administration is going to honor immigrants’ contributions to the state of this union. He can protect, support and unleash them to do great things, changing the country for the better.