If Joe Biden has something to spare, it is “political experience.” Few figures know better than he the backstage and rituals of the exercise of power in Washington D.C. His personal history fully accredits the saying: ”the devil knows more for old than for devil”; although in this case the fallen angel occupies the pompous position of President of the United States of America.
Newly released as the oldest president to arrive at the White House — he is 78 — Biden has spent four decades getting to know the bowels of the small Inside The Beltway universe, most of that time as a legislator.
Returning to the classic reference to the way laws are made — “like sausages” — he belongs to the select group of butchers who do know the recipe to integrate their three main ingredients into the same sausage: public consensus, alignment of factors real power and, the magic sauce, the votes necessary to achieve their approval.
Precisely for this reason, on the migration issue Biden represents the best option to return to his country its world model status in terms of social inclusion, economic growth, respect for diversity and attachment to liberal values. Especially in a historical moment in which a microscopic organism was stopping in its tracks the process of accelerated world economic integration of the last decades, the United States finds itself before the enormous opportunity to rebuild its global leadership, from “the right side of history” .
Almost 20 exact years have passed since that moment — the first week of September 2001 — when on the South Lawn of the White House, about to get on a helicopter that would take him to a political rally in Ohio, President George W. Bush He declared as imminent the comprehensive immigration reform, “The Whole Enchilada” demanded by his “friend” Vicente Fox, the Mexican president, present.
But since “they weren’t enchiladas,” a week later everything collapsed. The same happened in 2006-2007 when hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants took to the streets in dozens of cities across the country, backed in fact by a vast majority of the public who understood very well that these “illegal aliens” did not they were Martians and much less terrorists, but rather their neighbors, their associates, their workers, and often part of their own families. Despite this, then as in 2012-2013, Washington demonstrated its status as a swamp, from which it was one day born.
Over the decades, the importance and benefits of all kinds that the more than 50 million Latinos offer to the rest of society have been fully demonstrated, with amplitude — they are the youngest segment of the American demographic, those who create the most businesses, the group greatest in schools, and his love of the country is as great as anyone else.
Due to political reckoning, laziness or any other reason, the fact is that during the Obama administration, whose vice president was Biden himself, it was not possible to carry out an immigration reform that had been possible a quarter of a century earlier —1987-1988— during the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan.
And Trump arrived. A demagogue willing to do anything to win the sympathy of the most backward segments of society. The celebrity star who did not hesitate to uncover the famous “Pandora’s Box” of racism, intolerance and a rhetoric too similar to that of Italian fascism and German Nazism of the previous century.
