The question in the headline has a short answer, a slightly longer answer, and a long answer.

The short answer is, “Meh.”

The slightly longer answer is, “It’s a mixed bag.” He came in strong with liberal ideas about giving all asylum-seekers the due process they are guaranteed to under American law, and the dignity and understanding they are morally entitled to due given their extreme suffering and vulnerability. But then Venezuela’s meltdown happened, and Nicaragua’s and Haiti’s and Afghanistan’s, and the migrants temporarily halted by the pandemic were on the move again, and the effects of climate change kicked that up a notch, and TikTok and WhatsApp showed desperate people around the world how to run the gauntlet to America, and then … everything changed.

The humanitarian crisis at the border was predictably portrayed as a national security crisis (“Invasion!”) by a conservative movement enthralled by immigrant-baiting Donald Trump, and the American public signaled to Biden that they don’t have any confidence in his ability to manage the border.

So Biden did what Biden does: He sought to stake out a position in the middle, pairing harsh deportation measures (which infuriated progressives) with generous pathways to safety (which infuriated nativists). When that didn’t work either, he moved further right, but by then Trump’s Republicans had abandoned any pretense of policymaking and refused to play ball.

And here is the long answer:

The backlash to Trump’s inhumane treatment of migrants, as well as Bernie Sanders’s spirited challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination, made for a Biden campaign that was remarkably immigrant-friendly. As soon as he was inaugurated as president, Biden set to work:

He instructed immigration authorities to revert to the Obama-era policy of prioritizing for deportation those undocumented immigrants who actually posed a risk to public safety.

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He ended various presidential initiatives whose purpose was to scrounge up money for Trump’s notorious wall on the southern border, and he ended the former president’s “Muslim ban.”

He also ended the “Remain in Mexico” program that forced asylum-seekers to wait for their cases to be adjudicated on the other side of the border, often in highly dangerous circumstances.

And the cherry on top: He submitted a bill to Congress that would have given amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants currently in America. The bill never made it to a floor vote.

But then the flow of migrants increased tremendously, and the political calculus changed. The topic of immigration made a dramatic comeback, as did Donald Trump. So “the Biden approach to immigration” entered Phase 2: the “both/and” phase.

According to a January 2024 report from the Migration Policy Institute, so far, Biden has taken 535 immigration-related actions, more even than Trump. He made lots of technological and bureaucratic improvements to the asylum and naturalization procedures designed to give more people the chance to make their case to the American authorities.

At the same time, he deported an immense number of undocumented immigrants, and he sought ways to close off access to due process for many others.

In a recent Zoom interview, one of the authors of the MPI report, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, pointed out to me a few areas in which Biden’s flurry of rules and orders had a powerful impact.

“Legal immigration has rebounded,” she said. “It’s a success that’s often not in the news because it’s not as flashy, but it’s really a huge success. [Immigration] is good for our communities, and it’s a really big part of who we are as a country.”

And then there’s Biden’s prolific use of humanitarian parole, which is a tool that the president has at his disposal to temporarily allow certain people into the country to protect them from harm. Biden has paroled an unprecedented number of asylum-seekers. That has made the immigration activists cautiously hopeful, but it might also have created more problems for the system down the road.

Extending humanitarian parole to the extent that Biden has reduces the number of people claiming asylum at the southern border. But the people who are paroled into the country generally do not have a direct pathway to citizenship and can be expected to eventually apply for asylum in whichever region of the U.S. they happen to settle.

The application backload will still make it impossible for their case to be processed expeditiously — but now they’re in the interior of the country and they’re much less likely to be deported. Humanitarian parole is a flimsy Band-Aid, not a cure.

With the November presidential elections approaching and the president’s approval ratings in the tank, “the Biden approach to immigration” recently entered its Phase 3: the “enforcement first” phase. He endorsed a bipartisan Senate bill that abandoned anything resembling amnesty (even for DACA recipients) and promised the kind of “shutting down the border” actions that Trump had long sought.

But you don’t beat the Republicans at their own game, and the GOP killed that bill, too.

So here we are. Biden’s initial good intentions ran smack into the harsh reality of the huge numbers of migrants arriving at the southern border. Subsequently, his political instincts and imagination delivered a combination of sticks and carrots that did little to solve the crisis.

Many asylum-seekers got a reprieve, and many didn’t. Politically speaking, in the absence of congressional support, Biden’s “get tough on border-crossers” approach struck out the same way his “be kind to vulnerable people” approach had. Both the “kind” bill and the “unkind” bill are dead. So now we’re back in Phase 2: limbo.

Meh.

Razvan Sibii is a senior lecturer of journalism at UMass Amherst. He writes a monthly column on immigration. He can be contacted at razvan@umass.edu.