James Gibney, Columnist

The Immigration Debate Democrats Need

Trump wants to talk about illegal immigration, but the legal system is in desperate need of reform.

March 12, 2020 at 2:00 PM UTC

James Gibney is an editor for Bloomberg Opinion. Previously an editor at the Atlantic, the New York Times, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy and the New Republic, he was also in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1989 to 1997 in India, Japan and Washington.

America’s future depends on them.
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America’s immigration laws, which received their last major overhaul three decades ago, are fundamentally broken. Yet the future of U.S. legal immigration rarely surfaced during the dozen Democratic debates held since last June. This weekend’s debate offers Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders what may be the Democrats’ last chance to fill in that blank.

Yes, previous debates have featured plenty of podium-thumping denunciations of President Donald Trump’s inhumane asylum policies, vows of support for Dreamers and promises to restore America’s values and reputation as a nation of immigrants. Of the 25 questions that moderators asked about immigration (about 6% of all debate questions), however, all but two involved some aspect of unauthorized immigration.